The fair closed on Sunday January 20th around 5 pm. It always amazes me, when a fair closes how quickly books and works and chairs and tables seem to vanish – as if none of them had ever been there leaving the rooms more than empty. They have been there, all of them: wonderful prints, amazing books, dedicated arists, a caring team of organizers and many, many interested visitors. A good lot more than came to the last fair. Some 50 artists had been putting their works on show for two days plus the opening on Friday night.

On the ground floor of the New Factory of the Museum der Arbeit in Hamburg Johannes Follmer and his wife welcomed visitors with their marvellous papers demonstrating how the sheets were made traditionally by hand. Students of book arts school Burg Giebichenstein presented their ideas of what a book can look like.

And this is what the first floor of the New Factory looked like.

A wide room with large windows and a swinging decoration created a wonderful calm and warm atmoshere – perfectly fine to take one’s time to look at books and prints.

This is a group of printmaker artists calling themselves „Augenfalter“. Being located in Leipzig they took a cooperation with Leipzig Book Fair called „Marktplatz Druckgrafik“ to built up a special area for printmaker and book artists within the Book Fair’s department ,book+art‘. This new scheme had a fine start up in 2012 and will be running during this year’s Leipzig Book Fair in March for the second time.

Daniel Hees with his Mühleisenpresse and Caroline Salzwedel with her Hirundo Press came side by side.

Rosa Gabriel (Erzengelpresse) was presenting her very sophisticated works of book and paper art. She is one out of 260 artists from around the globe that take part in the project „An Inventory of al-Mutanabbi Street“.

A wide variety of prints and books and styles could be found. Visitors got taken in – and willingly took their time to look and discuss and enjoy.

As with the works by Vogelpresse (Munic) they did not hesitate to discover a work of book art from the first to the last page.

John and Pat Randle, who are running Nomad Letterpress in Whittington (UK), were having copies of Matrix with them, which they publish roughly once a year with articles on contemporary topics of Fine Press Printing and Book Arts.

It was a wonderful fair. Many thanks to all who contributed to it – special thanks to Mr and Mrs Bartkowiak and their dedicated team of BuchDruckKunst e. V.

We are all looking very much forward to meeting again in 2014!
The 9th Book Arts Fair in Hamburg will be held: 18 + 19 January 2014.

See you there!